Centralized
utility
bill management
utility
bill management
How a global telecom leader
automated utility spend management
for revenue recovery
automated utility spend management
for revenue recovery
THE BEGINNING
Enriching customer experience
with technological innovation
with technological innovation
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming and disrupting the
telecommunication industry, and our client—one of the largest
telecom operators in the world with a presence in 15
countries—is at the forefront of this change. They are the
largest carrier of international voice tariffs in the Middle
East and Africa, with more than 167 million people in their
subscriber base and 300+ valuable brands under their umbrella.
This major telecom player is on a continuous quest to boost
digital transformation. To that end, they consistently launch
new initiatives and lean on disruptive technology to
differentiate their offerings, add value to customers, and
achieve operational efficiencies.
THE CHALLENGE
How to reduce inefficiencies
in payments processing
in payments processing
The telecom’s existing system for utility bills was processing
invoices across close to 6000 sites from six utility
providers, which included payments to authorities, as well as
private owners.
Stakeholders at various hierarchical levels had to manually
analyze and check each of the 5,000+ bills for data accuracy.
The human factor alone constantly led to double payments,
missing payments, and reporting inaccuracies. And when the
utility providers sent notices of accounts in arrears, the
team had to wade through the volume of bills and spreadsheet
entries to find the source of the late payment.
To make matters worse, executives and other key stakeholders
lacked visibility into the state of payments. Be it remaining
budget, payments to date or utility payment splits, reliable
data on which to make cost-optimization decisions did not
exist.
The extraordinary amount of human effort involved combined
with an inefficient process, led to errors and cost overruns,
which was magnified by the expanse of the portfolio. Fed up
with the unproductive and unwieldy process, this leading
telecom provider sought a centralized solution to help with
cost benchmarking and bring about cost savings by reducing the
time required to process and manage invoices.
THE CLEAR SOLUTION
Digitized utility expense management through a single platform
After an intense vetting, the telecom chose Facilio to deliver
an end-to-end solution to process payments digitally. Facilio
offers a modern and streamlined approach to utility bill
payments.
Today, the telecom monitors utility consumption in real-time
using data captured by both smart meters and physical energy
meters across the properties. Bills are bulk-uploaded from
multiple utility services into the Facilio system. Using parsing
templates, the system's built-in, AI-powered invoice parsing
automatically extracts data from thousands of bills in the form
of PDFs or images.
Then, using tariffs programmed into the system, the telecom
validates bills submitted by utility providers by comparing them
with actual consumption. When a cost discrepancy arises,
Facilio's automated workflow triggers user-defined alerts to
notify the right stakeholder. The stakeholder can then quickly
resolve the error and reduce the overall billing cost. The team
reports immense relief at having a digitized process that helps
them quash the time-intensive effort involved in preparing
detailed payment collateral.
The telecom also benefits from Facilio’s built-in error
resolution, which has eliminated the need to configure a
workflow and then synchronize it across the various processes.
For example, to ensure accuracy, the system issues payment memos
only when all predefined alerts are resolved, which helps
eliminate double payments. Bills are then routed through
automated approval workflows in Facilio and, finally, pushed to
ERP for payments. Today, both multi-stakeholder collaboration
and payment signoffs happen at speed.
Facilio has also made it easy for the key executives to get
answers to critical questions, for instance, those related to
month-on-month payments, utility provider expense summaries,
monthly savings, and remaining budget. Using Facilio's
configurable reports and dashboards, the team now has complete
visibility into the entire bill-processing cycle. The team also
enjoys the flexibility to analyze data without external
dependencies, for instance, to benchmark invoices against past
timelines or to compare them to similar occupancy scenarios.
Today, this major telecom is poised to deal with the
complexities posed by processing large amounts of data. With
their automated system, they've drastically reduced the need for
human intervention and eliminated the possibility of user error.
Efficient utility spend management at scale
AI-led automation to transform manual billing operations
Optimized utility spend
With intelligent alerts and notifications, timely payments happen, and revenue loss does not.
End-to-end visibility
Facilio’s integrated invoice management delivers complete visibility across 6,000+ sites
Simplified audit and invoicing
Data-backed operational decisions have massively improved operational efficiencies
